Three One Eight: Springtime

 Here we are--- one full year into the time of the Red Death. For many of us, it's been a year of empty streets, empty storefronts, working from home, masks, and social distancing. More than half a million dead in the US this last year. Something like 530,000 lost to the Red Death as of today.

No one has been thinking much about sex this last year, or at least no one has been thinking about sex-as-pleasure. Quarantine Porn exists, but there's something so desperately forced about it. And everyone seems too tired for pleasure, let alone for flirtations and Adventures. I'd thought that the plague and the lockdowns would lead to a revival of phone sex and erotic letters, but that doesn't seem to have happened. More's the pity about phone sex, I must say. Phone sex was always something I liked--- I'd always been told I was good at telling stories and creating scenarios ---but not even lockdown boredom and frustration seems able to make people talk on the phone these days.

My friend Jill down in NZ wrote me once about her best teen memories of oral sex:

Best memories... God, so many nights...I was able to practice on boys just a few years older than me, so when I started spending time with much older men I was very good. And I like to think I returned the favour -- teaching 16 year old boys just how to eat pussy.

I do remember one night...when I sucked two boys off while the other one watched... I loved that, and so did they. After I'd sucked off both of them and we smoked a joint, they did each other, which made me so wet... We were in the back of a car, and later I did ride one of them... But I still wish I could have had them both at the same time.

Those stories-- stories like that --are still out there, but everyone seems too exhausted and depressed to tell them, let alone to create more. I have a friend-- I always call her the Other Melissa, a nickname that dates back a dozen years now --who's in Vienna tonight. Vienna was always my city, and I envy her being there. I should be back in my old flat in the IX. Bezirk, and I should be at Zum Schwarzen Kameel with her, listening to her stories of being a young professional domme in late-Noughts New York. She phoned me once from a cab going to Brooklyn to meet a client to say that it was amazing to think about how much pleasure (and money for pleasure) was being exchanged on any given night in the city. I'd so love to hear her stories, to hear about the adventures she's had since she was nineteen and at Juilliard. 

There is a compliment I received once. One gets so few in one's life that they're important to remember. A lovely five-eleven girl of twenty in Asheville wrote about me in her escort blog:

Sugaring is dangerous for obvious reasons. I was going to a top secret meeting with a person who, for all I knew, would turn out to be someone who collects human female hides and would force hydration upon me. So I texted a good friend--- the only friend to whom I could ever reveal this sort of information ---to be concerned if I didn't give him an update by morning. 

Coincidentally, the friend I texted was my first Older Man, but more of a mentor and certainly not a Sugar Daddy. If he had been such a thing, I hardly think we could've considered it sugaring. He says I'd have been his mistress, a sort of extended affair between compatible souls. We are very much alike, my first Older Man and I, and because of that, I do wish it were him instead.

That's a compliment I've treasured these last seven or eight years. Talking with her late at night, telling stories back and forth 'til dawn--- that mattered more than I can say. 

If anyone's thinking about sex at all these days, it's not about sex as pleasure. Blogs and Twitter timelines are filled with angry exchanges in the Trans Wars, and I intend to keep well away from that. The Gender Wars of the early and mid 2010s morphed from being about male-female skirmishing into being about whether gender and sex are related, or if either really exists in the ways we've believed these last few thousand years. The Gender Wars were ugly; the Trans Wars are vicious and brutal. I don't want any part of them.  

I will note that I, as an aging roué, am what one side in the Trans Wars would disdain as a "genital fetishist". I'm attracted to female bodies--- female in the older definition. I won't say that others shouldn't have the right to present themselves however they wish, but my own tastes are fixed, and have been since a long ago day when I discovered a box of high-end "glamour photography" magazines and realized that, yes, one life question had just been answered. But just as the early Gender Wars and #MeToo made it impossible to talk about male desire or present heterosex as anything but coercive, intrusive, and always both unwanted and mediocre, the current Trans Wars have made it difficult to talk about desiring bodies-- desiring what I define as beauty. So we will stay away from that.

Throughout the time of the Red Death, we've been pulling back from sex and from talking about sex as something we want or miss. The predicted lockdown baby boom hasn't happened. There doesn't seem to be a spasm of post-pandemic hedonism building up. We're all just too exhausted and glumly empty for that. 

It's springtime now, one year into the Red Death. I wear my mask almost everywhere and I have a small Plague Doctor stuffling who sits on my writing desk. But on days like today, I wish there were lovely voices on my phone or lovely Young Companions sitting across a streetside table from me and telling stories. 

I don't want it to come to a world and a time when there are no new stories to share, or (worse) no new adventures and encounters generating stories. Stories matter, and it matters that you're able to share them with lovely companions, to create narratives about adventures to share over the aether late at night. Having adventures and encounters matters, and so does being able to craft those into tales told in the dark.